5 PPC Mistakes To Avoid (And What To Do Instead)

Hey guys! I’m Solomon with Clickx. Today’s marketing hack of the day I’m going to teach you PPC mistakes to avoid. Alright! I will teach you 5 mistakes people make every single day and I want to get you better ROI that you’re getting from your PPC campaign! So let’s get started!

PPC Mistake #1: Bidding All Broad Match Keywords

The number one thing I want you to look at in your account is bidding all broad match keywords. Alright! So, this is one of those things where you’re newbie into AdWords. You start creating it and in fact if you watch or do the step-by-step instructions that Google will give you. You will most likely have broad match keywords and only broad match keywords, because no one ever taught you the other match types and you’ve done it yourself or you paid someone else in your team who is not an expert or not a certified Google AdWords expert.

Recognize The Differences Of The Four Keyword Match Types

So long story short, chances are you have three or four ad groups, you have thousands of keywords or hundreds of keywords and they’re all just bidding all broad matches. Alright! So, this is a big mistake there are four match types it’s really common for everybody and anybody that’s you know, everybody’s running search ads, it is broad match is the one I talked about! Broad match modifier which looks slightly different, it has plus signs in front of it and that means that you’re going to get slightly better qualified traffic than just broad match. And phrase match is when you actually have a quotation mark and you have two or three words that you want to make sure it is in the search query before your ad would even be shown and then there’s an exact match which is the most conservative way of doing it. That means that, if they don’t have that match, if they don’t have that keyword exactly the way you have on inside AdWords, your ads will not show you won’t waste any money!

So, if you are a conservative marketer which you should be in some cases, if you’re not looking at your AdWords campaign every single day, you should be very conservative, but if you are you should definitely run your campaigns on exact match that way you know, you’re not wasting money, but you’re not going to get a lot of search volume either just because people may not be searching exactly that way alright!

However, Broad Match Is Great For Research

Now, there are some positives to using broad match, because I do use broad match because I’m like that because I want to study the market, I want to understand, I’m doing research. Right! I’m using paid search as a means to do research to understand what’s working, so that I can come up with content strategy and generate more traffic and so forth.

So, if you’re really into researching and figuring out where is the search volume what’s happening, then you can definitely use broad match, but make sure you have a limited budget on that campaign that you’re looking at the search query report on a regular basis! If you can do this every day then you are okay to use it, because it will give you tons of insights that exact match or phrase match may not!

PPC Mistake #2: Fighting To Rank Keywords For The #1 Spot

Alright! So, here’s another mistake a lot of companies or markers accidentally make maybe or they do that on purpose; it is to fight for the first spot every time, all day, every day 24/7 you want to be the number one marketer in that keyword!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with that, if you really know your map maybe you want to do that, but a lot of marketers they have every keyword they want everything to be first spot and that means that they’re losing a lot of money because you’re trying to bid up the campaign, trying to come beat the other competitors, but you don’t really have really good conversion rates to justify why you want to be fighting for the first spot!

So, your bidding strategy should be based on conversion rates and historical data, go back several years if you have that much information, figure out what keywords are driving conversions and use that as a means to increase the bid 5%, 10%, 20% maybe more bits on the mobile side or wherever it is that you’re doing and that is going to get you more conversions and you have a reason to fight for number one spot!

PPC Mistake #3: Failing To Utilize Geotargeting For Ads

Moving on to number three, ladies and gentlemen! I want you to think about where you target your ads! Alright! Geo-targeting is so important and it’s one of those things that people really fail to look at! Google by default, everything is turned down for your ads. Right! So, everything means you’re running a search and display campaigns that it shows up everywhere in the US, you know all kinds of new features that Google rolls out, everything is on by default. So you’re a local company or your regional company, you need to make sure that your ads only show up in those areas. When they’re there and if they’re physically located based on all the things that Google has like geo-targeting and IP address targeting, you want to make sure these are only going to be shown to people that are physically in that location, because it does not help you to get a search for mini Apple if the service is not there in your location. If you’re a national brand you can still do it, we’re in so just turning on all the United States which most of the time that’s probably what you want to do like, hey! We’re a national company you know, we can service anywhere! I would look at where your best customers come from, because like I said your ad budget is very limited!

PPC Mistake #4: Creating The Same Ad Copy Across All Keywords

Here’s number four. It is to include the keywords in your ad copy that’s specifically to the search query! So, you have to make sure that the ad copy and the ad is extremely in line with what the person is looking for what the intent is, so it’s not too broad! Alright! The problem is a lot of marketers want to create one ad copy; they want to copy that across all the keywords, because they’re too lazy to come up with new ad copies! The fact of the matter is, the folks that are searching the visitor, the person who is looking for this thing that you do; they don’t care about your laziness! They’re like, oh! That ad is not relevant! Even though you’re bidding it up and you’re the first spot, it’s not relevant. It’s going to hurt you in the long run, because your quality score is going to go down, because people are not clicking on it! Then you are end up paying more money, just because you can put so much more time and effort into crafting the perfect ad copy including the keywords in the headline even in the description!

So, if you start doing that you’re going to get really microscopic view into your ads, you’re going to get much better ROI from it, just from that alone.

PPC Mistake #5: Linking Ads To Irrelevant Landing Pages

So, last but not least! Let me tell you about this one is a big one and I hate it, because I am personally, I look for things and I look for the most relevant ad, because I love when companies advertise they mean it! Right! They really are focused on getting more customers and I look at an ad copy and I’m like, wow! I love this ad copy and I click onto it. It goes to their home page! Alright! Not having a relevant landing page could affect your conversion rate! I want to look out for that, just don’t get lazy and say, you know! We’ll send this to our service page, we’ll send that to our industry page and all this is going to our home page! That’s a big mistake a lot of people do this, because they don’t even get the concept of landing page!

So think about that in your ad copies, in your landing pages and figure out how you can get deep the keyword ad copy, landing page headline, all to match will be beautiful!

Thanks for watching! I hope you got some insights and some mistakes that you can avoid today and give better ROI tomorrow!

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Solomon Thimothy is the Co-founder of Clickx. Solomon began his career in marketing over ten years ago with a focus on helping businesses gain better visibility online by focusing on more exposure, more traffic and more leads. Follow him on twitter @sthimothy

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